Dr. Hans Ternes is a Professor of German, Lawrence University, Appleton, Wisconsin since 1968. He received his B.A. and M.A degrees from the University of Illinois, and his PhD. Degree from the University of Pennsylvania. He completed post-doctoral studies at the University of Munich, University of Freiburg, and the University of Bucharest. His primary research interest is 20th century German Literature, Romance Linguistics and the European fairy tale. Dr. Ternes was born in 1937 in Romania. He emigrated from Germany to the United States in 1955.

My ancestors –who in all likelihood came from various regions of Germany - left Germany around 1800. They spent some time in Poland and then continued to Besserabia where they settled in a place called Krasna; they soon founded neighboring villages, such as Emmental.

Around 1870 a group of settlers from Krasna bought land in the Dobrudscha and founded a village that was named Caramurat (the name is Turkish and thus indicates that there was already a previous Turkish community in the area). The name was later changed to Ferdinand I. Today its name is Mihail Kogolniceanu. My great grandfather, my grandfather, my father, and I were born there. It was one of the most beautiful German villages in the Dobrudscha. The king of Romania visited Caramurat on one of his tours. The outstanding landmark of the village is a Gothic church which still stands there in all of its glory.

I have always been curious about the dialect we spoke in our village. It is very similar to the dialect that was spoken in Krasna and the surrounding German villages, and yet it is different.
When I sent my wordlist to Josef Gross, who was born in Emmental, he was surprised by the number of words he did not know. Since languages are similar to organisms, they grow and expand. Thus the German dialect of Caramurat –while basically similar to the dialect spoken in Krasna – has its own character. It is in some ways very unique, and thus when people from our village meet and hear some of these peculiar words, it connects them and gives them a very nostalgic feeling and at the same time a sensation of great loss.

In order to find out what sort of German dialect we spoke in our village, I submitted my story entitled “Heimat”, written in the Caramurat dialect, to Prof. Nils Kammenhuber, an expert in the field of German dialects. Here is his conclusion: “Also, der Dialekt ist entweder Saarländisch aus einer mir dialektal unbekannten Gegend . . . oder aber ein sehr nahe verwandter Dialekt aus einer unmittelbar ans Saarland angrenzenden Region; vielleicht unmittelbar angrenzendes Rheinland-Pfalz . . . oder aber Lothringisch.“ (Nils Kammerhuber: hirvi@net.in.tum.de) (The dialect is either from a dialect region of the Saarland which I don’t know . . . or a closely related dialect from a region bordering the Saarland . . . or a dialect from Lothringen [German for Lorraine].”)

My word list is ultimately an homage to the linguistic creativity of my ancestors who lived in a multiethnic environment and took from various German dialects and from the foreign tongues that surrounded them to create a distinctive dialect that bound them together as a closely-knit community.

The list is obviously incomplete! I invite “Landsleute” (fellow countymen) from the general region of my birthplace to contribute words to my list!